Category Archives: Potential And Limit Of The Human Brain

The disruptive power of collaboration through orchestration

Two months ago I started refreshing my German using an app called Duolingo. Since then I’ve become a big supporter and clearly I’m not the only one : after only 4 years, 120 million people across the world use the free Duolingo app to learn a new language doing about 6.5 billion exercises every month.

Why has Duolingo become the largest language education platform in the world ?

At the first level I could talk to you about the obvious drivers for it’s success which made me totally hooked :

it’s ease of use anytime/anywhere/any device (cloud and smartphone centric),

it’s intelligence to detect the things I really struggled with using big data, and of course

it’s engagement ability through gamification that kept me using Duolingo every single day since two months (talking about creating adoption of a product) !

And yet this does not explain the real disruptive nature of Duolingo. Some App’s I use are successful for the same reasons but are not so disruptive. Why ?

Duolingo – an example of a platform revolution in Education.

A word we tend to see a lot when we read about digital disruption is the “the power of a platform strategy.” The authors that first coined that word even wrote a book about it. “The platform revolution” is a comprehensive recap of what makes a platform so disruptive often referring to the same examples Uber and Airbnb.

Summarized, a platform strategy creates and orchestrates an ecosystem of individuals that are both contributor, producer and user of the content of the platform.

Two notions are key :

While users enjoy the value of consuming content they enrich the content and thus create value at the same time for other users.

We speak of a network effect as the more people are in the ecosystem the more value is created for the ecosystem.

The now famous paper napkin drawing by the Uber founder simply illustrated that vicious circle dynamic (linking more taxi drivers with more demand).

But rather than illustrating the platform again with Uber, let’s focus on Duoligo

That vicious circle dynamic is what makes Duoligo so amazing as it’s proper user community is actually using the platform but at the same time building the content to make a full language course, TOGETHER. This way in just a couple of years it has been able to create 66 different language courses across 23 languages; with 22 additional courses in development. This way it is very likely that Duologo will one day come out with a West Flemish (my personal dialect) language course !

Duologo insipired by CAPTCHA

Before launching Duolingo, it’s founder Luis von Ahn had already demonstrated the power of massive-scale online collaboration : he invented reCAPTCHA, which is the text you type in to show the website you are human. You may not have realized it but you were actually helping to decipher / read the letters of a scanned ancient book. At a ratio of 100million words a day this is the equivalent of 2.5 million books a year !

In the same video, van Ahn explains how Duolingo uses the same platform capabilities to create massive scale online collaboration.

Conclusion

As a digital optimist I hope this post will not only make you understand the dynamics of disruptive digital collaboration but will also demonstrate that there is still a bright future for solving unsolvable problems marrying a digital platform with the scale of human collaboration.

A couple of months ago I made a small speech at the Brussels European Crowdsourcing event. My focus was the increasing importance of Mobile Broadband Connectivity in general and the Internet of things (IOT) in particular will have as accelerator for crowdsourcing.

Little did I know that I would be talking crowdsourcing all evening in be it a totally different context…

….my 16 years old daughter Tatiana was up in arms with a Fysics test she had to … not prepare for… but actually help design the questions of the test herself.

Specifically, recapping the task : the class was devided in eight groups of 3 students. Each group had to deliver five test questions out of a Fysics 5 chapters. The teacher will then pick at randum 10 questions from the total of 40 questions.

Making test questions it turned out is much harder than learning answers.
Moreover, as to be expected, these digital kids shared ahead of time all the questions AND answers they each had developed … so defeating the purpose of a test right ? Well not so much as now everybody was studying 40 questions !
So croudsourcing the questions provided a dedactical collaboration rarely achieved before – the dedactical power was in the journey, the engagement between students more than in the finality of the test.

To conclude, schools often focus on the “infrastructure” part of digitalization. I don’t enough hear schools reinvent their primary mission which is to educate as best as they can. The Kan accademy with their ‘flipping the class room” is one of the good examples, the MOOC as well. The crowdsourcing of testing is now way up there for me as another example 😉

At the Leaders Meeting @Paris event 2015 I was scheduled to do the introduction of Doctor Steven Laurey’s. Due to the PARIS bombing events the previous Friday evening we had to adapt the agenda of the next day and reschedule the speech of Docter Laurey’s to a future edition.

I have however posted my introduction (in Dutch) of this remarkable person.

I was very much looking forward to the arrival of the new book of Theo Compernolle. Five years of work resulted in quite frankly the most thorough recap of all the analysis around on the impact of digital technology on our brains.

The title “Brain Chains” sounds more pessimistic than the subtitle of the book i.e. “discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyper connected multi tasking world”.

As a technology optimist initially I was indeed hoping to read a lot more on the “unleashing the potential” (Heaven) rather than reading about the possible negative impact on the brain (Hell) (For reference to HellVen see previous post)

In heind zeit however I have come to realise that Theo’s book really put the light on a big blind spot of I’m sure many people. Clearly digital technology is proving a key enabler when used well however there are really some key watch out’s that are recapped below :

1. Professional don’t know how their brains works yet it is their most important tool to work with: professional success depends on our brainwork, but professionals don’t know how their brain works. We are living in a world where our success depends on the quantity and quality of our brainwork, but a majority of brainworkers unknowingly ruin their intellectual productivity because they have no clue about what the human brain can and can’t do. Isn’t it strange that you don’t know how your most important tool works ?

We have a slow reflecting brain that can think long-term, set long-term goals, be proactive and reflect (something that no other animal is capable of). Reflection is sustained, focused critical thinking with a purpose. It is conscious, persistent, logical, critical thinking at an abstract level : manipulating concepts, mental images, memories, hypotheses and theories in the absence of the objects or the phenomena we are thinking about.

We have a fast primitive reflex brain that can process many inputs at the same time, it does not consume much energy and it is lightning fast because it works with many genetic and acquired shortcuts. The reflex brain traditionally reacts faster than our reflecting brain as this was important for our survival in the savannah, but that causes lots of problems for brainworkers today, as it’s attention is unconsciously captured by novel or sudden sensory changes, such as smells, sight and above all sounds.

We have an archiving brain waiting for a break of the other two brains to be able to order properly the billions of bits and bytes of information, to select what it wants to keep and to store it in such a way that it is available for future use.

3. We are NOT built to multi task but ironically we believe we are good at it : this is really the core of the book and for me the biggest AHA. We may have joked about the difference between men and women on multi tasking but the reality is our brains (men, women) CANNOT multi task. This is where digital devices, when misused in an “always on” mode, is clearly NOT helping our productivity. Fact : every time you are interrupted/distracted you need a couple of seconds to restart your reflecting

As a result we actually have significantly dropped in quality reflection : research has show that on average managers only have per week one period of 45minute stretch to be able to reflect and have new insight ! How inefficient is that ?

4. The fuel of our brains is SLEEP and we are getting too little of it – especially kids : the reflecting brain and the archiving brain are in balance: when one is activated, the other is deactivated and vice versa. They compete for time and space in our working memory, a part of our brain that can be compared with the central processor in a computer. That’s why the best time for the archiving brain to really work is when we sleep. Better archiving in its turn results in better reflexing. Sustained sleep deprivation therefore impacts structurally our reflexing mode !

More alarming, the current younger generation is constantly multi tasking and sleeping much much less than we did. This was for me a real wake up call. Theo mathematically explains how this generation’s cognitive power is affected by that ! I’m not sure sufficient parents understand the risk of kids doing long night Facebook chats with their friends…

5. Finally, we humans make the difference with machines because we have “insights”. But to have insights you need to learn to “disconnect” : our job as a professional is to digest, understand, process, produce and create information, knowledge and insights both for our company and for your personal development and career. Original concepts don’t come out of computers. They come out of the insight you have. Technology however can help to shape insights in many ways. But if used wrongly can significantly impact our thinking quality. So leverage your technology to leverage your brain power by learning to disconnect.

Industrial world versus knowledge world : Efficiency versus Share of mind
Dan puts it really well that in an industrial worldview, engagement really only used to be measured by physical output : how many bolts per minute do you bolt on. In other words it is all about efficiency. In a knowledge worldview it is really hard to measure “efficiency” : Continue reading →

I recently saw this TED talk entitled “Interspecies internet .. an idea in progress.” This is a combined initiative of four people — cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss (who works with Dolphins), musician Peter Gabriel, computer engineer Neil Gershenfeld (MIT professor) and Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet. Their core message is that we basically totally forgot to think about how to integrate the “bio mass’ (animals) in how we think of the future of internet.

Vince Cerf reminded us that the internet was intially intended to be a platform to connect machines (i.e. “internet of things avant la lettre”). Very quickly however it became an “internet of people” with more than 10billion people connected. It is only recently that we have come to retalk of the “internet of things” also called M2M (Machine to Machine) where we expect to have 50bn connected devices. Examples are connected cars, appliances personal health devices etc…

Introducing the Interspecies Internet (I 2 I)

In the last 40 years tons of experiments illustrated how we have learned to communicate / talk with (certain) animals. The most famous experiment is probably the KoKo Gorilla (the 8 Continue reading →

Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist at Harvard. Taylor experienced a massive stroke at age 37 when a blood vessel exploded in her left side of her brain. As a brain scientist she was in a unique position to be able to understand the impact of such a stroke.

Rating of the book 9/10. This book has been the book that years ago got me passionate about what the human brain is, what it’s impact is not only human behavior but more importantly how we feel and experience the world.

The book focusses on the importance of the left brain (non-rational) in particular as Taylor “lived” in the non-rational brain for many years before getting back her full brain functions. Once released of the filter of the rational brain one comes to realize how critical emotions are to enrich and balance our lives.

Sherry Turkle is a professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and has a PHD of Sociology and Personality Psychology at Harvard.

Overall I find that the book (Oct 2012) pictures well how new technology is impacting how we behave more often more intrusively than we would like to accept. I found the book provocative through it share listing of real life anecdotes yet not really able to synthesize the essence of the trends.

The book focusses on two distinct parts. In the first part, Turkle zooms in on the amazing evolution of “social robots” that are becoming more and more sophisticated in their ability to create the illusion of companionship. Turkle followed a young generation surrounded by many forms of social robots perceived by them as “live” objects often providing better interaction that “real life” objects. Today the largest commercial application of social robots is for toddler day care and…. elderly care. In the second part, Turkle researches the “cyborg” younger generation, networked “always on”, “tethered to the wireless web” enabling their ability to do multi-tasking, our twenty-first -century alchemy. Cyborgs are always looking for “moments of more” but quite often they are left with “lives of less” Continue reading →

Follow Blog via Email

25 years of building businesses through leading teams with a passion, across industries (FMCG, online Travel, Telecom), across functions (Marketing B2C & B2B, Sales, Business Unit, Wholesale), across regions (Belgium, UK, Europe, US) and across market phases (start-up, high growth, maturing)